I was having a glance on Reddit just now and noticed there was this subreddit I have created a loong time ago called r/cointrader. Ever since I created it (not sure how long, the traffic stats only showed stats from a year ago) I haven't looked in there like at all, maybe once at one point but it was as dead as a subreddit could be. Today I notice this though.
52 subscribers?! What? Oh okay, I guess because the name and increase of crypto people they have subscribed to it thinking it was active? Before I started looking more into the posts, the users (these are usually always things you gotta do on sites like Reddit as you can't trust a user based on anything. It could be bought accounts from black markets, it could be farmed accounts for a certain purpose. They're activity could be fake or purchased to be done and what they post about, there is no way of telling really as it requires just checking their history, downvotes if anyone cared enough if that person can be trusted or not.
Instead I went to the traffic page to witness this:
The 5 pageviews first could just be a coincidence, someone wrote a typo a group of people went to it by accident, but checking if any of those 5 subscribed in those months is impossible as subscriber stats don't show past 3 months. It could have also been over a year ago so it wouldn't show in the stats either way.
What happened in Oct-Nov-Dec though looked weird, their subscriptions were spread out over many days throughout the whole 3 months. The bottom of this next screenshot is of the last viewable subscriber analytics, not sure why you can't download the rest or get them to list, oh probably cause they archive all posts once every 6 months and you can't vote on them any longer after that.
Now this is weird to me cause it means A, either someone has typod it into a group of many people but somehow they've read the message and visited the page over a period of three months? Or they've just genuinly gone there after following me on Reddit? Why such a high percentage would subscribe to it though is hard to say...
The first post that I can find in the subreddit seems from a random account but the others after that all started 3 months ago at the same time as the traffic started coming in only a few accounts actively post and a big amount from the same accounts in a row.
So the question is.
Is someone trying out a reddit bot army to sell? Somehow chose my subreddit instead of just making a new one that takes literally 10 seconds?
Or.
Are they trying to frame me pretending that I am dumb enough to start a bot army to manipulate Reddit's voting by testing it out on my own dead subreddit?
Hmm, hmm, hmm.
Now it could of course be me, as looking at it from this perspective there is no way I can prove to anyone that it is not me. Depending on what they've been voting with those accounts and the little I've used reddit lately doesn't look like someone has been voting my comments extra much. Someone could of course also want to do that in the future and get me banned from Reddit, after all I can't see their voting activity, only a Reddit admin can.
Would maybe be worth contacting them about it, but just being able to write about this on an immutable blockchain felt nice. Let's see what happens. It's some crazy times and a lot of platforms are starting to silence users for unclear reasons.